Two poor souls suffered through MRIs, heart scans, and other medical tests to figure out what was causing them to go blind for up to 15 minutes at a time. After discovering that checking their phones in bed was to blame, one woman still couldn’t stop. Such is the power of technology.

You may consider your eyes a priceless commodity, but for Mexican cavefish, they were a burdensome expense. In a first-of-a-kind study, scientists have figured out exactly how much energy an animal saves by abandoning vision — in this case, anywhere from 5 to 15%.

Echolocation isn’t just for bats and dolphins—people can do it, too. Some blind people have learned to use echolocation to tell the size, density, and texture of objects around them, and researchers believe anyone can learn how.

Joshua Loevy is an attorney in Kansas City, MO, who happens to be blind. For years, people have compared him to blind attorney Matt Murdock, whose alter ego is the superhero Daredevil. So Loevy was excited to check out the new Daredevil series... but he can't.

What does space feel like? I'm not talking about space itself—but rather the images we see in a telescope. Could you render those spectacular images into something that a blind person could experience? That's exactly what a pair of astronomers are trying to figure out.

For people going blind from retinal degeneration, there are almost no therapies. Their vision dims and they lose their sight as doctors look on helplessly. But a new experiment involving retinas grown from stem cells promises a new direction for research — and, in the future, a possible treatment.

It's not every day that science and crazy brain implants lead to the generation of what is essentially a new sense, but it is that day today. Scientists from Duke University have found a way to make rats "feel" invisible infrared light and someday that same tech could give sight to the blind, or give us humans extras…

Braille wasn't widely in use in the 1830s, but Samuel Gridley Howe, founder and president of the New England Institute for the Education of the Blind, wanted to develop an atlas that his students could read unaided by a seeing person. To that end, he created a specially embossed atlas that could be read by touch.

This Sensory Substitution Device uses the camera to gather visual data and then uses a rather nifty computer algorithm to translates this data into sound. With a little practice, blind users can identify complex objects, and even read words.

You're looking at the most recent prototype of Japanese robotics manufacturer NSK's mechanical seeing-eye dog. This model uses Microsoft Kinect to navigate obstacles, and its creators are adding such features as voice recognition to prevent the robot from leading its master astray. Will future generations be dealing…

Not that one should go around shaming seeing-eye dogs. But the Tacit haptic glove, designed by Steve Hoefer, is a little DIY project that fires sonar from the wrist, keeping a visually impaired individual aware of their surroundings.

There's a terrible hereditary eye disease called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy that affects men in their twenties. It's a mitochondrial disease inherited from your mother that leads to total blindness within six months of onset.

Vision and hearing are generally regarded as two very different senses. Unless, of course, you can echolocate. Now, scientists have revealed for the first time that human echolocators — blind individuals who navigate their surroundings by producing mouth clicks and listening to the returning echoes — actually process…

It's no David Copperfield, but in this day and age surely that's a good thing? Winner of the Best Illusion of the Year contest, this moving circle of dots tricks the eye into seeing changing color even when they're not.

A Japanese research team has successfully grown a "rudimentary" mouse eye in a petri dish using stem cells. This has many implications for future research and curing blindness. Above is a time-lapse video of the stem sells spontaneously organizing into an "optic cup"—the precursor to an eye. Now they need to grow a…